


ginger

by rensshi



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Break Up, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:48:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26298916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rensshi/pseuds/rensshi
Summary: Donghyuck and Renjun grow out of each other. You can argue that the timing of it matters.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Donghyuck | Haechan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 37
Collections: K-Pop Ficmix 2020





	ginger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thereisnoreality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereisnoreality/gifts).
  * Inspired by [omne trium perfectum](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21393310) by [thereisnoreality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereisnoreality/pseuds/thereisnoreality). 



> hello user renhyuck, the moment i read omne trium perfectum, i knew i had to remix it. i hope you're still proud of having written your original in just an hour because i could never, even with a short fic, ty for giving the material to inspire T___T hope you enjoy this!

  
  


Renjun gets a single tooth loosened on a Thursday morning in a fight. 

The text that he receives when he's nursing his bruises and the swell in his cheek in the evening with ice that Sicheng gave him in silent frustration, is from a number he doesn't expect to ever hear from:

 _painkillers help,_ followed up with a secondary _take care and see u around,_ is what Lee Donghyuck said about thirty minutes ago when Sicheng had been fixing Renjun up in the bathroom. Renjun’s thumb lingers on the send icon; Lee Donghyuck ditching his usual route to get bubble tea to instead throw himself into a brawl for a person he barely knows should warrant a response.

He dials him up instead because some things were better said that way; the more it rings, the closer he presses his phone against his ear as if that’d magically spur Donghyuck to pick up. He still doesn’t. They hadn’t talked at all when they’d walked to the bus stop after the fight to get home, as if by telepathy, they just knew where the other needed to be.

And well, Renjun thinks that’s that and subsequently figures he’d probably never have much to do with Lee Donghyuck after that anyway, other than the friendly nod through the school hallways. 

But on the day of their high school graduation after the ceremony, Donghyuck leans in and places the curl of his smile on Renjun’s mouth, in the misty haze of the rain holding an umbrella that honestly looks half-broken (this detail, Renjun will cling onto to keep himself grounded as best as he can. If Renjun had had any idea that he’d spend his time after high school navigating through bad timing with Donghyuck, of all people, he’d think twice about kissing him back). Donghyuck asks him out after that when they walk by the fence at the back of the school, crossing the soccer field to where the persimmon tree gave them reprieve from the heavy rain just a little. The tree is this old thing, boughed from bearing fruit all these years.

Renjun will think about this tree when Donghyuck is spooning out the flesh from the fruit when they’re in season, the juice sticky on his lips and on Renjun’s cheek when Donghyuck kisses him there in his apartment. The white walls of Donghyuck’s place felt as saturated and vivid in the season like persimmon orange and Donghyuck’s smile glinting, warmth washed over the kitchen tiles in a way that Renjun sometimes tried to capture in his paintings.

That’s the thing—no matter how hard he stares at, or pays attention to all the little details, the bigger picture halfway through his fourth coat of going over the shadows with the oil paint with more vibrancy, is what really matters (“If it bothers you, I’ll throw them out already,” Donghyuck had said, eyeing the handful of takeout-acquired expired ketchup packets and sweet chilli sauce that’s been sitting in the fridge for god knows how long. The packets fell into the bin with the pathetic celebratory crackling of the trash bag, and Donghyuck had winced a little; it pained him too having to waste anything like that).

Three months now after their relationship ended, in this coffee shop that’s too quiet in the afternoon, Kun stops turning his iced coffee around on the table opposite Renjun. He leans forward, shoulders tensing the way he’s mulling something over. 

“Do you think the last three years with Donghyuck were a waste?” Kun asks, his voice low.

Renjun stops picking at the stubborn hardened skin by his nail under the table, and it catches onto the hem of his sweater sleeves, still slightly long enough to engulf his hands—he’d grown up wearing Sicheng’s old ones and gotten too comfortable with the size.

“No,” Renjun mutters, and sighs when Kun just keeps staring, waiting for him to go on.

It’s a type of kindness, Renjun realises later on. Other than allowing Renjun to vent, this is probably Kun's way of trying to help and make Renjun believe his own answer, because it sure as hell is for Renjun’s own good.

  
  
  
  


_you’ve still got things here._ Donghyuck follows this up with a _are you going to come by for it?_ Or should I throw them out, is the next thing Renjun expects because he’s truthfully forgotten all about it.

There’s one of his oversized sweaters—the one Jaemin saw on Donghyuck so many times, snug around the shoulders that he used to call it Donghyuck’s favourite when really it was just one of Renjun's.

 _I do. Can you just meet me when your classes end?_ Renjun texts back. Donghyuck used to skip out on his lectures every now and then before dinner but Renjun doesn’t want to be overconfident about knowing his schedule.

Jaemin runs into him at the courtyard, both of their hands stuffed into their pockets from the chilly air, and the genuine surprise on his face reminds Renjun that they’d only met because of Donghyuck.

“Do you really want to know?” Jaemin says, scuffing his sneaker against gravel and clearly hesitant. “He’s not doing so well.”

Renjun raises his eyebrows. “Really,” he deadpans.

“The fuck am I supposed to say?” Jaemin huffs but laughs a little anyway. “He loved you. I, of all people, thought you’d last a little longer than this. What happened?”

“Guess I just finally wanted out,” Renjun finally says, so quietly that Jaemin stills to catch the response. His ribs seem to shudder when he lets this out.

The plan instead to get his sweater back becomes waiting for Donghyuck right outside the library, away from the courtyard where the silence of the air between strangers, or at least between people who don’t know how to act in front of each other, becomes magnified, as the conversation with Jaemin earlier had exhibited when he’d looked down at his shoes after not knowing how to respond to Renjun’s answer. 

Renjun still has no idea if Jaemin had been there for Donghyuck after their worst fight, the one where it had gotten so ugly that Renjun shoved him and felt Donghuck’s weak fist cut across his jaw and defined the already sunken ship that had been their relationship at that point. Renjun would find it funny if Jaemin had offered any consolation along the lines of _this is both screwing you over._ Because Donghyuck—he and Renjun—held on longer than either of them should have, even after the month-long radio silence during the summer that they subjected each other to after that. 

“Here,” Donghyuck says, his voice still hushed from the lack of use having been in the library. “They’re washed. There are other things as well,” he begins when Renjun looks through the eco bag. But the look he gives Renjun is genuinely curious, despite the hint of tightness set around his jaw that Renjun’s seen a thousand times.

“These were a gift,” Renjun blurts out before Donghyuck can ask Renjun how he is. The yellow knitted gloves and beanie were something Renjun’s mother had knitted. The colour suited Donghyuck’s hair the best at the time when his dye job had faded into brown. His hair is orange now, street lights bouncing off his head like flames curled.

“You borrowed it so often I thought you might have wanted it back,” Donghyuck explains, shrugging. “Does your mom still knit?” 

“She’s already got plans for the family gifts this Christmas,” Renjun says with a wry smile.

“Great.”

“I ran into Jaemin earlier,” Renjun says without thinking. “He was...well”—

“Concerned? That’s always been Jaemin, no matter how weird and greasy he outwardly is, you know he’s a nice guy,” Donghyuck scoffs. 

Something in Renjun’s face, like the tiny smile there that Donghyuck can still catch must do it next. Because he says, “If Jaemin was concerned then I guess it won’t surprise you if I say I wanna get back together again.”

“Hyuck, don’t do this. Just fucking don’t.” 

“I know,” Donghyuck murmurs. “I know.”

It’s like unraveling stitches along the lining of his ribs honestly, and he’s never had stitches near there but it reminds him of his first real encounter with Donghyuck; after he’d helped Renjun pick a fight with the guys who’d beaten Sicheng up for dating a guy—the type of twisted romantic ride-or-die shit that seemed thrilling if Donghyuck had already been his boyfriend at the time, but now in retrospect, felt like a colourless memory that played all choppy in Renjun’s mind. 

What he remembers most is this: It had felt like gulping down air and the pain in Renjun’s chest buzzing like lightning adrenaline that stayed with him after he’d reached home, left a substantial space in his chest that rattled, like the humming of the an old A/C and windows that shook with the wind before a thunderstorm, when he’d gotten Donghyuck’s text. Like anticipation he didn’t know he should have expected. Maybe it was then that Renjun had decided that the theatre kid in his year was really worth paying attention to the way everyone else in their high school who proclaimed Lee Donghyuck the “silver boy” did. 

The dull pain then didn’t feel like much compared to now. Renjun doesn't know how to feel when Donghyuck says bye instead of _see ya_. 

Later on, he'll recognise it as the poisonous lick of anticipation, or maybe hope even, that things could be different. 

  
  
  
  


“You keep disappearing when this happens,” Donghyuck told him once after Renjun went to visit Donghyuck’s apartment to catch him before one of his theory classes. “I don’t know if you noticed, or if you only acknowledge it when we argue”—

“Because most of the time you push back and then I don’t know where to go from there,” Renjun said. 

Donghyuck straightened up then against the island counter, looking anywhere but at Renjun. As a third person, it’s probably more fascinating to see him like this—the wired current charged underneath his skin, caught under his tongue when he’s trying to hold back, because masking things wasn’t really Donghyuck’s strongest point. To Renjun, the fascination was always dialed up by twenty, so much that it kind of just felt twisted (like the prickly warmth he felt when Donghyuck looked at him, dazed and taken when Renjun had kissed him in front of their friends the first time. Like how he’d learned that Donghyuck tends to talk nastier during sex after making up, how Renjun had come so hard, one side of his face burning slightly from being pressed into the sheets while Donghyuck grinded his hips roughly from behind, his fingers sunken in hard enough to bruise).

“It’s the little things too. Makes me think I’m doing the work when things get bad,” Donghyuck murmured.

“The work doesn't just happen when things get bad," Renjun said. 

  
  
  
  
  


Renjun lost his virginity on the night of Donghyuck’s twentieth birthday. It wasn’t Donghyuck’s first time, but the way his legs trembled around Renjun’s hips, eyes screwed shut to brace himself until Renjun started moving properly made him wonder if Donghyuck had been this open and responsive to Renjun touching him everywhere, for his first.

“Do it to me,” Renjun said the next time, his voice clear and steady until it wasn’t when Donghyuck had been in him balls-deep, laughing softly against Renjun’s mouth when he swore at Donghyuck to go fucking faster already, that he’d understood and kept his eyes closed too. Learned all the ways that Donghyuck felt around him and in him that became implicit, right down to the way his mouth moves.

A month after their breakup, Renjun had let a mutual acquaintance at Jeno’s party kiss him, and the guy’s bangs curled delicately against his brows and the details he sees up close being the moles on his face and how long his lashes are, only makes him think of Donghyuck.

“That’s not a curse,” Kun says, laughing a little in the coffee shop when Renjun tells him about his botched attempts to get over his breakup this way. “Maybe that’s a good thing. I never saw you as the type anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Renjun grumbles.

“Getting over someone by getting under another. You usually need time to internalise,” Kun explains. 

And that sums up what Renjun has been trying to do these past three months: internalising was another name for trying to grasp for a version of yourself that existed before having fallen in love with someone, and that needs a fuck ton of brooding before you get to the internalising. Renjun never really believed in being able to find himself through another person anyway. 

But God did he believe in loving someone with every tired bone in your body—never mind the tense silences after an offhand comment taken the wrong way when you’re both sleep-deprived and in terrible moods, the snide remarks and distaste at the way the accusations roll off their tongue. How just _listening_ to them talk about mundane things felt like labour tied to a contract that you both signed off thrice in the form of three tattoos that you'd gotten for the other person. You forget that this contract has a possible expiry date. The thing about love, or the love he knew, is that there's the risk of it being doomed from the beginning your heart ticks its way through time.

“Gege, he was jealous of you, once upon a time,” Renjun reveals, watching the way Kun’s eyebrows quirk up.

“Really.”

“He assumed a lot of things. Like how he thought I kind of had this thing going on with you when he met you. It was crazy.”

There’s a pause, filled with the sound of Kun choking on his iced Americano.

“But you didn’t really think that at the time, right? I’ve had an ex before who was the same,” Kun says and Renjun looks down at his cold coffee. “I know how it can make you feel at first.”

After Kun had given Renjun his last tattoo on his forearm, Renjun kissed Donghyuck during the argument, a kind of desperation there that made Donghyuck more eager, that looked really good on him at the time. Renjun’s hands were fisted in Donghyuck’s shirt until they’d been scrambling under it until Donghyuck gave in and Renjun felt the expanse of his ribs when he said, glancing at Renjun's forearm, “I’m scared because this will never go away.”

“No fucking shit,” Renjun laughed then, and Donghyuck leaned in again towards his mouth to shut him up, the kiss less angry this time.

After that, Renjun slept so deeply in the nights after he’d gone back home to his family over the weekend. He’d woken up on one of those mornings believing that the argument about distrust on Donghyuck’s part, had been a far away dream and that it had never happened and that not even the soreness of his forearm or the fresh tattoo there, could disprove it the first minute he digs his knuckles against his eyelids to rub away the sleep.

In retrospect, maybe the tattoos weren’t all that Donghyuck had been talking about.

  
  
  
  


“Was it love?” Sicheng asks him one weekend. He’d found the yellow beanie and gloves in a corner of Renjun’s room, thrown there because Renjun doesn’t think stuffing it away out of sight under his bed would suffice when someone else might need them for the harsh winter coming soon. Throwing it in the trash isn’t an option either.

The beanie doesn’t smell like Donghyuck anymore, and it just smells like how home does. Home as in here, with his mom and Sicheng, not Donghyuck’s apartment where it had been just a place to live in, that Donghyuck had never been able to whole-heartedly call home either for the duration of university.

He’s said the words before to Donghyuck, a mirroring of what he wished Donghyuck could sincerely say to him right before they broke it off: _I trust you._ Even when Donghyuck had given back his sweater, the both of them knew that Donghyuck didn’t really mean what he said about getting back together. A long time ago Donghyuck stopped being able to verbalise things Renjun needed to hear the most, and saying that he wanted reconcilement out loud felt like one last attempt at trying to make up for the shortcomings, even though it had been too late.

(“I don’t feel like me when I’m with you anymore,” Donghyuck had said quietly, muffled into the back of his elbow on the head of the couch, and Renjun had been staring at his own hand in Donghyuck’s between them and knew exactly what Donghyuck felt. Renjun wished he'd said more.)

“I don’t know. Maybe I did at one point. But it’s not what love should have become,” Renjun answers.

  
  
  
  


“I never got to ask you when I returned your stuff back, if you were doing okay,” Donghyuck says to him one day at the same bus stop at sundown.

“I am,” Renjun says, more startled than anything that his pencil almost slips from the sketchbook in his lap. He’d been in the middle of untangling his headphones, taking his time and dawdling between scrolling through his phone when Donghyuck materialised out of nowhere at the other end of the seats at this bus stop. “Are you visiting home?” Renjun asks, slightly confused and swallowing down the funny lump in his throat. Donghyuck hardly ever visited home.

“Yeah,” Donghyuck replies, smiling sincerely. “I wanted to be in there in the morning for Chuseok.” There’s a long pause. “About what I said last time, when I gave back your stuff—I wasn’t thinking, and well—sorry,” Donghyuck finally says, shouldering his backpack.

Renjun feels the tug of a smile on his own mouth. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

In a lot of ways like that first encounter with him in high school, it was like telepathy, knowing what the other meant throughout everything.

For a moment, there's the anticipation again curdled within before he blinks.

The bus comes by and Renjun gets up first. The tension in his ribs unfold and unravel, like the oncoming deep purple sky at dusk letting go of the blinding orange and gold sunlight.

He turns back to Donghyuck and says, “Stay safe, and enjoy Chuseok.”

There's a familiar look in Donghyuck’s eyes that passes over and disappears quickly. He just waves without a word.

Renjun boards the bus and doesn't look back through the window.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the brockhampton song of the same name. the non-linear narrative might be hard to keep up with, i encourage u to read the original fic if you haven't already :)


End file.
